I usually sweep them up for her. Not because it’s a safety hazard—I’m pretty sure that five hundred gallons of urine are only psychologically combustible—but because I could get blamed for them, have to do another Sunday school walk of shame or something.
When I see her, trading off shifts, we don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. We know where we are, we know what we do. On Saturday, the one day we each have off per week, should we ever be under the same food court or lobby or department store security camera, and somebody’s watching us on that closed-circuit feed, we’ll stand out, I know: the slumped shoulders, the slack face, the vacant, war-torn stare, like we’ve seen too much already. If ghosts could walk and mumble and wear clothes, that’s what we’d be, I think. The only place we wouldn’t stand out is the nursing home.
So, no, we don’t need to be reminded about this by ever talking to each other.
As far as Tandy knows, too—as far as I know she knows—the new Spanish/English signs in the bathroom about mandatory hygiene procedures are just one more of the suggestions my dad’s taken from his small businessman’s handbook.
In case you can’t read either Spanish or English, there’s a diagram as well, a stick-person me, who, after he doesn’t wash his hands, ends up outside the Hut, with X’s for eyes and wavy lines coming off his hands.
Whether Roy can read or has to follow the diagram, I have no idea.
Unlike Tandy and me, he enjoys the job, always shows up ten minutes early, his thermoses of coffee slung all over his body, a non-regulation bandanna tied around his head, low over his eyes.
Maybe this is what third-shift people are like.
My father used to check on him, I know, ease through the drive-through in some elaborate disguise, trying to trip Roy up, but one night after a three AM spot-check I found my dad in the kitchen, slamming one of his fake beers so fast it was spilling down his chest.
When he looked at me, his eyes were blown wide, his lower lip trembling.
I didn’t ask, don’t think he would have told me anyway.
After my cigarette—I balance the butt on the emergency flush plug of the first tank, because I’ll be back—I drape my right glove over my left shoulder and sort the day’s haul of customer satisfaction cards. They’re part of the packet of brochures we give. The customer can either drop them in the box bolted to the back of the building or they can mail them in.
Mixed in with the cards, like every time, are religious pamphlets and business cards.
At the bottom, though—at what would have been the top, before the box was emptied—are two tickets for the Bantams game tonight.
I look through my window, out at the city.
Chickenstein.
He was here.
Or she.
My hand shaking a little, I spread the rest of the cards and pamphlets across the counter, only stop digging through them when I get to the ones that are always there as well, the cards that are wavy now because they were wet before.
On one of them once, scrawled in pen, was: sorry—didn’t have anything else to write with.
There’s a reason we use yellow cardstock for the cards now, instead of the standard white.
I pull my glove back on.
5.
In my darkest hours, I allow the possibility of a convoy of out-of-state school buses nosing into our parking lot.
For vehicles too heavy for the tracks, policy is to walk the Johns and Janes out to the vehicle. This involves wearing the converted Whac-A-Mole tray that hangs on your shoulders with two padded hooks, like bass drummers in marching bands have.
In the slots the moles once lived in are overspray canisters and sponges and curtains and wipes and gloves and brochures. Twice I’ve found a coffee can, with change in it.
As the tray only carries eight used or empty bottles, what a busload would mean is about eight thousand sloshing trips, while trying to manage the drive-through as well.
Policy during an outbreak of service like this is to wear adequate back support.
I think my father is afraid I might sue him.
He thinks it’s my back I’m worried about.
For the next twenty minutes, though, until four-thirty, no school buses appear on the horizon. Twice a blue Nova pulls up to the leading edge of the track, but each time she loses nerve, backs out.
The bathrooms a mile down at the truck stop are free, we know. “But not private.” This is written in tempura paint on our front glass.
It’s not all my father wanted the sign-people to paint, but there wasn’t room for everything he wanted them to write, not if we still wanted the words to be readable from the street. So now we have brochures.
What they document is the inevitable development of establishments such as this one.
It starts a year ago at a Bantams game, where they serve beer. Where the urinals are in constant use, pretty much. The women’s side as well. Aside from various hygienic issues (here my dad’s supplied testimony from ex-custodial workers and pictures so close-up they look like scratch ’n sniffs), the opposing team—this is supposition, but it’s hockey, too, and everything goes in hockey—somehow managed to replace the home side’s urinal cakes with urinal cakes that had some of the properties of dry ice, apparently. The result was that for the second and third periods, the men’s room was clogged with a sort of warm fog of pee: “the urine of a thousand or more gentlemen that night, mingling in your lungs.” The result of that was an outbreak of bronchitis and sinus infections like the city had never seen. One old fan’s death had even been attributed to the incident, though when Dad prints his name, he gives him his own special line, like a little headstone in the text. Like he’s surrounding him with the moment of quiet he deserves. But he doesn’t include an obituary picture, as we don’t want to be sensationalistic.
The idea of breathing urine is enough, really.
What he doesn’t say in the brochure is that some eight thousand male fans went home that night unaware, not coughing.
What he’d never say is that two of those fans were us.
To him it’s not like lying. In business, he says, all is fair, so long as it’s legal.
I don’t think he learned this in Sunday school.
6.
Prudence shows up just before five, after her yearbook meeting. She sneaks around to my window, jack-in-boxes up to eye level and flashes her camera.
“Jane?” I say in my best customer-service voice.
“No,” she says back, “Prudence, remember?”
It’s our joke.
I let her in the back door.
